VisitLovers is a start-up company based in Lucerne, specialized in offering a wide pallet of tourist-oriented tours from local, non-professional guides. Essentially, every local citizen can register himself as a VisitLovers guide and offer his very own tour around the city and its attractions. VisitLovers differentiates itself from standard tourist guides because of its rather genuine character and makes it possible to potentially highlight lesser known parts around the city, providing an authentic experience.

The Challenge: Implement a tracking setup on the website visitlovers.ch via tag-manager to adequately measure, analyze and rate customer behaviour for marketing activities.

The benefit: The tag-manager provides sufficient possibility for enabling web analytics for marketing activities. The approach is to be documented and made available to third parties, such as other start-up companies.

Process: As a first step, the Google Analytics account of VisitLovers was audited. Since the company didn't had a web property, we created a new property and added three different reporting views. Afterwards we had a short brainstorm meeting with VisitLovers in order to identify the different business goals of the website. We defined a suitable event structure and possible conversions.

As a second step, we configured the Google Tag Manager Setup. Since this setup should be transferable to other websites, we decided to go for an approach which is complicated to implement in the first place, but easy to maintain and extend later on. First, we created a custom HTML tag to create a string of the HTML object with which the user interacts. These strings are used to match three different LookUp tables that contain the respective event category, action and label. In order to track additional elements one only has to add a new line in the respective lookup table and provide a proper naming structure for the events.

As a third step, we tested the entire setup. As always in web projects, the testing takes as much time as the implementation itself. It is important that the tests are done very carefully as it is a nightmare to generate false or distorted data.

Results: With the tag manager being implemented, VisitLovers is in the position to extensively collect user behaviour data. This allows them not only to adjust their content, customizing their webpage to cater more to the most favored tours. It also enables VisitLovers to have an in depth and insightful knowledge of their customers and ultimately what possible new tours could be offered and what the people visiting Lucerne actually are interested in seeing. This helps tremendously in developing the company towards aligning its goals to the customers needs and eventually becoming a successful company.

The source button below links to an overview presentation of the implemented tag manager, as well as the one pager presentation of the challenge for the open data hackdays. Furthermore, the implemented tag manager code ("GTM-NJL8HLC_workspace5.json") can also be found, providing the exact reproducible code to allow other interested companies to establish its own tag manager.